Podcast episode
How to Hire Reps Who Actually Know How to Sell | Andrew Johnston | 30MPC Hall of Fame
30 Minutes to President's Club5 May 202537 min
Description
🎙 ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS: Coach reps on storytelling—it’s a foundational skill that improves every sales conversation. Evaluate rep interview performance based on the questions they ask, not just their answers. Run mock pitches with target persona info—test prep, not product knowledge. Benchmark rep candidates one level below your best AEs to fairly assess potential. ANDREW’S PATH TO PRESIDENT’S CLUB: Head of Sales @ Superhuman Sr Director of Sales @ Scale AI Head of Global Email Sales & GTM @ TwilioManager Enterprise Sales @ Twilio RESOURCES DISCUSSED: Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal Save $50 on any 30MPC course with code “PODCAST” 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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My hiring manager interview is to reverse the normal flow as normally that is an opening bios. Then you ask questions as the hiring manager, and then maybe you've got two, three, four or five minutes for questions from the candidate. I reverse this, do the opening, do quick bios, and then I open it and have the candidate ask me questions. “I'm basically treating this as a pseudo discovery call and I evaluate them on that of them doing” a discovery call on me and the company. And then I use that as a green shoot point to ask other questions about their experience. All right. We've done a lot of conversations around interviews, Andrew. First time somebody's talked about the reverse interview. Let's dig in a little bit. How do you start this interview? Very different. So they don't know it's coming.
In Hiring SDRs
The HR people are like, I know I don't have a dog food stipend but I have a gym stipend or something like that. And just by changing the feature into the story, you'd be amazed how much more people will lean in just because you told someone a real experience that someone like them also had. “If you can pull from these little snippets of examples, and if you can drop a logo—that's” not necessary—but for example, if I'm selling Mark to you or another sales leader, I'll pull an example where I was in a conversation recently with a company and a VP of sales, and she was saying how she hopped on a call with a rep, and she didn't realize email was a problem until she opened up the email with this rep together, side-by-side, had
with customers. And when I tell that story, every sales leader is like, oh, that gives me anxiety. And pulling that fear and the anxiety sells the product. That is the story that is, I felt that fear or I feel that fear every day, and now here's the solution. Here's the thing that I can think about. And so that is like its own mini story. “If you can find enough of those and then throw them together in a sales conversation, it” can work really, really well. It's proven that humans are attracted to stories. It's a proven mechanism for information sharing. And it's funny, this is just so circumstantial, but last night my son and I were watching some crazy YouTube video and one of the things came up and it was like the U.S. memory champion.